Mean-field description for the architecture of low-energy excitations in glasses

Abstract

In amorphous materials, groups of particles can rearrange locally into a new stable configuration. Such elementary excitations are key as they determine the response to external stresses, as well as to thermal and quantum fluctuations. Yet, understanding what controls their geometry remains a challenge. Here we build a scaling description of the geometry and energy of low-energy excitations in terms of the distance to an instability, as predicted for instance at the dynamical transition in mean field approaches of supercooled liquids. We successfully test our predictions in ultrastable computer glasses, with a gapped and ungapped (regular) spectrum. Overall, our approach explains why excitations become less extended, with a higher energy and displacement scale upon cooling.

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Cited by in corpus (8)

• Elasticity, Facilitation and Dynamic Heterogeneity in Glass-Forming liquids
• Relevance of Shear Transformations in the Relaxation of Supercooled Liquids
• Scaling Description of Dynamical Heterogeneity and Avalanches of Relaxation in Glass-Forming Liquids
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• Scaling regimes and fluctuations of observables in computer glasses approaching the unjamming transition
• Soft modes in vector spin glass models on sparse random graphs